Fred Waters and I went to high school together. We were best pals. Some called us Beavis and Butthead. I didn’t care for it, but in high school, you don’t choose your handle. We were motorheads—into cars—even though neither of us had one unless our moms let us use the family auto, which was rare after we got busted for underage drinking while watching the street racing down behind Bulkley High School. Believe me, we would have been too embarrassed to drive their rusted station wagons down there where souped-up Civics and Mitsubishis ruled.
Fred had more luck with the girls than I did, though, and he wouldn’t have had any luck at all without grape juice and gin, which made Fred’s ascension into a chick magnet more remarkable. Now instead of juice and gin, he had stories—and good ones.
Fred was an EMT and worked for Capitol Ambulance in the city. He lost the bad haircut, got a military buzz cut, and started lifting weights. He set his sights on becoming a paramedic firefighter and hooking on with a city pension job in East Hartford. So in the meantime, while he applied to medic school, he was just pounding out the hours on the ambulance, making good pay with the unlimited overtime—pay enough to afford his own apartment, make payments on a new pickup and have cash to spend on the ladies.
A couple nights a week when he’d get off work, I’d meet him and some of the guys he worked with at the Brickyard Pub on Park Street for beers and pizza. There was a regular crowd of women there, particularly on Thursday nights, and we often ended up with tables pushed together and pitchers of beer lined up on the table with plates of nachos, buffalo wings and potato skins. Fred would be wearing his black boots, cargo pants and navy blue “EMS in the Jungle” tee-shirt, showing a medic swinging on a vine over the city rooftops on the front with “HARTFORD EMS” on the back. Looking at his biceps, I was thinking a little time in the gym would do me well, but then again Ronnie Meyers—Fred’s partner—was as scrawny as me and he always had a girl sitting on his lap. I thought what really made the difference were the stories they told, how they were always the center of attention. He and his buddies would tell their incredible tales, and the chicks would dig it. Me, I just sat like a little grinning idiot, happy if on any given night, when they’d push the tables together, a girl would be stuck next to me, and I could at least go home with the scent of perfume on me.
“So we get called to Edgewood Street for the shooting,” Fred says, as a blonde named Candy refills his beer, and the brunette Mindy, a hairdresser from down the street who has been his choice of the month, rubs his neck. “The address is the same one where we did that triple heroin overdose I told you about last week—the one where Spencer shoots one guy with the Narcan, wakes his ass up and has him do CPR on one of his buddies while I pounded on the chest of the other, and Spencer tubed them both while we waited for backup. That building is like EMS Central Training Academy. Shootings, overdoses, presumptions, assaults, fires, even a baby delivered there, but listen to this—this one tops them all. We go charging in there because the junkie who met us out front is going nuts, and you know junkies never get excited about anything except getting their stash ripped off. We go flying up the stairs with the cops right behind us.
“I get up there and I see this guy lying on a mattress holding his groin. The guy’s going, ‘My dick! My dick!’ The cop behind me shines his Maglite on him, and where his dick should be there’s nothing but a crater, a crater filled with blood.
“‘He hit ’em with a shotgun,’ the junkie who led us up there declares. ‘A shotgun—Boom, right in the fucking nuts!’
“‘My dick! My dick!’ the guy screams.
“And you can see it lying there, hanging by a tiny piece of tissue, like he almost shot it completely off, floating in the bloody crater like a dead whale.
“‘Who did this?’ the cop demands. ‘Was this over drugs?’
“‘Drugs?’ the junkie goes. ‘He shot him in the dick!’
“Ronnie’s running down to get the scoop stretcher so we can carry him down the stairs. I’m calling for a medic on the radio and dispatch is asking, ‘What do you have? What do you have?’ I want to say, ‘He’s shot in the dick!’ but in deference to the FCC, I just say, ‘Shotgun blast to the groin!’
“I put some gloves on. I don’t mind a little blood, but this is nasty land and a guy needs to be careful. I wrap a couple trauma dressings around him, and Ronny comes back with the scoop and some straps, and then we are carrying the guy’s screaming ass down the creaky stairs. I’m thinking to myself, I hope his dick doesn’t fall completely off and drop to the floor, cause I’m imaging the scene in the trauma room where the doctor is going to say, ‘Where’s his dick?’
“‘I don’t know, doc, it was right here.’
“‘Well, go back and get it so we can sew it on!’
“Then we have to go back and find his dick so they can reattach it. We get there and see a big rat making off with the wiener. We chase the rat all over the house, up and down the creaky stairs, trying to get the guy’s dick away from him. Next thing I know we’ve both fallen through a hole in the floor and are in the basement where these giant rats are sitting around a table playing poker. These rats are like state-fair pig-size rats—they’ve gotten so big from feasting on dead junkies and homeless people. They see us, and it’s snack time. Except they get in an argument about which one of them gets to eat us, so they start fighting each other, slamming their snouts into the others’ bellies and it’s like a shark rat frenzy, blood and guts splashing everywhere while we Speedy Gonzales it up the basement stairs and out of that crazy place. No thank you! I’m not going back for anyone’s dick unless it’s my own.”
He has them rolling with laughter, and the girls are turning red, trying both to be ladylike and not to pee themselves because the way he is telling it is really funny.
“We get him in the ambulance, and I shout to Ronnie to drive because the only medic who is clear is coming from cross-town, and Saint Fran is just up the road.
“The guy is going, ‘Are they going to be able to save it? Are they going to be able to save it?’
“I say, ‘Dude, you’ve got to worry about them saving your life. I mean, first things first here.’
“And he gets all frantic and screams again, ‘My dick! My dick!’
“We get to the hospital, and already there’s a crack whore there. She’s got a swollen bloody face and she’s yelling at him, ‘You don’t know nothing, remember that, you know nothing! No one did this to you but yourself. It was an accident, you tell them!’
“‘But he shot me in the dick,’ he protests.
“‘I love you, but you shouldn’t have gone boasting your mouth.’
“‘He shot me in the dick!’”
Then Ronnie stands and points to the TV, and there it is on the news.
Right there over the bar on the big TV, a shot of the Capitol ambulance, and Fred and Ronnie wheeling the patient into the back, surrounded by cops. Then the ambulance, red lights flashing, pulls away into the night. The announcer says, “The patient is in serious condition with unknown gunshot wound.”
“Unknown,” Fred says to laughter. “He got shot in the dick!”
Everyone laughs, and the two of them are like superheroes. This isn’t the first time they’ve told their stories, and ended them just as the news confirms their tale. Amazing.
“So they couldn’t really put it back on, could they?” Mindy asked.
“No, it’s probably back on by now,” Fred said. “A couple inches shorter maybe, but they were going to put it back on.”
“That’s incredible.”
“Many years from now,” Fred says mock-solemnly, “when my grandchildren ask me what I did on the great streets of Hartford, well, after tonight, I will never have to say, I didn’t save dick.”
And everyone cracks up again.
When the evening is over and the barmaid is wiping down the counter, and Fred and Ronnie are off with their women, and everyone else has paired off, a rotund barmaid approaches me and says, “That’s it for tonight. It’s time to go home. Time for bed.” She says it in such a disinterested way that it is clear to me she doesn’t even see me as someone who might, even in her dreams, take her home to bed. I’m just another obstacle to her night ending, someone to be shooed away in the same manner as the bar is wiped down and the chairs put up on the tables. She pulls the plug on the Doom video game I am playing.
“Com’on!” I protest.
She takes my quarter-full mug of leftover beer off the table, and turns her back on me. I sit there shaking my head at the callousness of it all, then head out into the night, and walk the twelve blocks to my boarding house alone.